TOWARD THE SUMMIT

TOWARD THE SUMMIT; Soviet Hints at a Role in Massacre of Poles

Reuters

Published: May 29, 1988

MOSCOW, May 28—
Radio Moscow hinted today that the Soviet Union was moving toward recognizing that its security police killed about 12,000 captured Polish officers and noncommissioned officers in a massacre that is the subject of one of the great mysteries of World War II.

The hint came in an English-language radio report on a ceremony attended by local Soviet officials Friday at a monument to the dead men in the Katyn Forest near the western Russian city of Smolensk.

The radio reporter said the monument, at the site of mass graves where the bodies were found, bore an inscription ascribing the massacre to Nazi forces that occupied the area from 1941 to late 1943.

The reporter noted that a Polish-Soviet commission set up this year was studying the massacre, which even Polish Communists say remains a source of bitterness in relations between the two countries. The reporter added, ''A German protocol which has now surfaced suggests Soviet bullets were found in the bodies.''

At a meeting last year, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, and Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish leader, agreed that ''blank spots'' involving relations between the two countries should be studied.